As hardware for reproducing and storing high resolution or high quality video content is being developed and supplied, a need for a video codec for effectively encoding or decoding the high resolution or high quality video content is increasing. According to a conventional video codec, a video is encoded according to a limited encoding method based on a macroblock having a predetermined size.
Image data of a spatial region is transformed into coefficients of a frequency region via frequency transformation. According to a video codec, an image is split into blocks having a predetermined size, discrete cosine transformation (DCT) is performed on each block, and frequency coefficients are encoded in block units, for rapid calculation of frequency transformation. Compared with image data of a spatial region, coefficients of a frequency region are more easily compressed. In particular, since an image pixel value of a spatial region is expressed according to a prediction error via inter prediction or intra prediction of a video codec, when frequency transformation is performed on the prediction error, a large amount of data may be transformed to 0. According to a video codec, an amount of data may be reduced by replacing data that is consecutively and repeatedly generated with small-sized data.
A multi-layer video codec encodes and decodes a first layer video and at least one second layer video. Amounts of data of the first layer video and the second layer video may be reduced by removing temporal or spatial redundancy and layer redundancy of the first layer video and the second layer video.
A method of predicting a disparity vector for encoding and decoding an image may include a method of predicting a disparity vector of a current block by using neighboring block candidates. However, when searching for neighboring blocks to determine the neighboring block candidates, distances between the current block and the neighboring blocks are not considered. Thus, a far neighboring block may have a search priority. In this case, an inaccurate neighboring block may be determined as the neighboring block candidate.